Election Resources on the
Internet:Parliamentary Elections in the Czech Republic
- Elections to the Chamber of Deputiesby Manuel
Álvarez-Rivera

The Czech Republic, which held its first-ever direct presidential election
on January 11-12, 2013, and a presidential runoff vote on January 25-26,
2013, returned to the polls for an early parliamentary election on October
25-26, 2013. A description of the system used to elect members of the Czech
legislature - specifically those of the lower house of Parliament, the Chamber
of Deputies - is presented here.

The Parliament of the Czech Republic consists of a lower house, the Chamber
of Deputies, and an upper house, the Senate. The Chamber of Deputies has
greater legislative power than the Senate: bills passed by the Chamber of
Deputies but rejected by the Senate become law if they are approved on a
subsequent Chamber of Deputies vote by absolute majority.

The Chamber of Deputies is composed of 200 members directly elected by universal
adult suffrage every four years. Originally, each one of the Czech Republic's
seven geographic regions plus the capital city of Prague was an electoral
region where political parties and coalitions of parties presented lists
of candidates. This arrangement lasted until 2002, when an amendment to the
electoral law increased the number of electoral regions to fourteen: the
country's new thirteen self-governing regions along with Prague. Voters may
indicate a preference for up to four (previously two) candidates in one list.

Chamber seats are allocated among the electoral regions in proportion to
the number of valid votes cast in a general election. Before 2002, seats
were initially distributed in each electoral region among qualifying lists
by the Hagenbach-Bischoff method of proportional representation (PR); if
there remained unfilled mandates, these were allocated at the national level
according to the lists' unused vote totals, first by the Hagenbach-Bischoff
method and then by the largest remainder method. However, the 2002 electoral
law amendment introduced the largest average method - the D'Hondt rule -
for the apportionment of Chamber seats in each region among competing lists;
all Chamber mandates are now allocated in the electoral regions, so there
is no longer a nationwide distribution of unfilled seats.

In order to participate in the distribution of constituency seats, a party
must obtain at least five percent of all valid votes cast at the national
level, while coalitions of two, three and four or more parties are required
to obtain at least ten, fifteen and twenty percent of the vote (previously
seven, nine and eleven percent), respectively. List seats are allocated to
candidates in the order in which they appear on the list, but candidates
receiving at least five (previously seven and originally ten) percent of
the total number of votes cast for their party have priority in the allocation
of seats, regardless of their position on the list.

The Senate is composed of 81 members elected for a six-year term of office
in single-member constituencies by the runoff voting system. Candidates who
obtain an absolute majority of valid votes cast are elected in the first
round. Otherwise, a runoff election is held between the top two candidates.
In the second round, the candidate that obtains the largest number of votes
is elected to office. One-third of the members of the Senate are elected
every two years.

The Velvet Revolution of November 1989, which peacefully ended more than
four decades of Communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia - the federation
of the Czech Republic and Slovakia - paved the way for
the re-emergence of genuine multi-party systems in both countries. In the
June 1990 parliamentary elections - Czechoslovakia's first free elections
in forty-four years - the Civic Forum and its Slovak counterpart, Public
Against Violence, won an absolute majority of seats in the Federal Assembly,
well ahead of the Communist Party, which nonetheless retained significant
support and arrived in second place, ahead of the Christian and Democratic
Union (KDU).

However, Civic Forum - an umbrella movement that brought together opponents
of Communist rule who held diverse political views - disintegrated after
the re-establishment of parliamentary democracy. In the 1992 general elections,
its main offshoot, the right-of-center Civic Democratic Party (ODS) of
then-finance minister Václav Klaus emerged as the largest single party
in the Czech Republic. Meanwhile, Slovakia - which swung in the opposite
direction and voted for Vladimir Meciar's left-wing, populist Movement for
a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) - pressed for further devolution of powers,
which would have transformed Czechoslovakia into a loose federation. This
was not acceptable to the Czechs, and the two countries subsequently agreed
to part ways peacefully - the so-called "Velvet Divorce." Thus, on December
31, 1992 Czechoslovakia ceased to exist, and the following day its two
constituent countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia became sovereign nations.

Having previously served as President of Czechoslovakia from 1989 to 1992,
the well-known playwright and former political dissident Václav Havel
became the Czech Republic's head of state in February 1993. Nonetheless,
Prime Minister Václav Klaus emerged as the country's dominant political
figure. Klaus, who pursued a large-scale economic privatization program,
headed a four-party coalition government of ODS, the Christian Democratic
Party (KDS), the Christian and Democratic Union-Czechoslovak People's Party
(KDU-CSL) and the Civic Democratic Alliance (ODA) until 1996, when the
center-left Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD) emerged as a major challenger
to ODS in a general election held in May and June of that year. Although
the ruling coalition fell one seat short of an absolute majority in the Chamber
of Deputies, Klaus remained in office as head of a minority government, and
subsequently gained the support of two deputies who had been expelled from
CSSD.

Nonetheless, in November 1997 Klaus' government collapsed in the wake of
a party financing scandal. Neither ODS nor CSSD wished to form a government
following Klaus' resignation, and President Havel subsequently appointed
a non-party figure, Josef Tosovsky, the chairman of the Czech National Bank,
as head of a caretaker government. In an early general election held in June
1998, CSSD emerged as the largest party, ahead of ODS but well short of an
absolute majority. CSSD would not form a coalition government with the unreformed
Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) - in no small measure because
the Social Democrats had been forcibly absorbed by the Communists in 1948
- but failed to reach an agreement with KDU-CSL or the Freedom Union (US);
meanwhile, ODS, KDU-CSL and US commanded a narrow overall majority in the
Chamber of Deputies, but Klaus refused to form a center-right coalition
government with the Freedom Union, which had been formed by anti-Klaus ODS
dissidents. In due course, CSSD and ODS reached an unprecedented "opposition
agreement," under which ODS tolerated a Social Democratic minority government
formed by CSSD leader Milos Zeman.

The CSSD-ODS "opposition agreement" continued until the 2002 general election,
in which the Social Democrats came out well ahead of the Civic Democratic
Party, and subsequently formed a coalition government with KDU-CSL and the
Freedom Union-Democratic Union (US-DEU) under the leadership of CSSD chairman
Vladimir Spidla. Nevertheless, the following year Parliament elected Václav
Klaus - the former ODS leader and former prime minister - to replace Václav
Havel as head of state (Havel was ineligible for another term in office).

In May 2004 the Czech Republic joined the European Union - Czech voters had
approved EU membership by an overwhelming majority in a June 2003 referendum
- but both CSSD and US-DEU fared badly in elections to the European Parliament
the following June, and the government's poor election showing triggered
the collapse of Vladimir Spidla's cabinet. Stanislav Gross succeeded Spidla's
as head of a coalition government of CSSD, KDU-CSL and US-DEU, but he was
forced to resign in April 2005, following allegations of corruption; Jiri
Paroubek replaced Gross as both CSSD chairman and prime minister.

Jiri Paroubek's coalition cabinet remained in office until the parliamentary
election of June 2006, in which ODS won the largest number of seats, with
the Social Democrats in a strong second place. ODS leader Mirek Topolánek
attempted to form a coalition government with KDU-CSL and the Green Party
(SZ), but the three parties held just half the seats in the Chamber of Deputies
- exactly the same number as CSSD and KSCM together. The impasse was finally
broken in January 2007, when Topolánek secured a parliamentary majority
with the support of two rebel CSSD deputies. Although Topolánek managed
to survive four no-confidence motions during the course of the following
two years (while securing the re-election of President Klaus in 2008 by a
narrow margin), his government's precarious parliamentary majority finally
came apart in March 2009, when four dissident deputies from ODS and the Green
Party joined forces with CSSD and KSCM to bring down Topolánek's cabinet
in a no-confidence vote. Following an agreement between the parties in the
outgoing coalition government and the opposition Social Democrats, President
Klaus appointed Jan Fischer, the non-partisan head of the Czech Statistical
Office, to form a caretaker government that would run the country until the
next general election, originally scheduled to be held on October 9-10, 2009.

However, in September 2009 the Constitutional Court struck down the law which
reduced the length of the lower house term. The Chamber of Deputies and the
Senate immediately passed an amendment to the constitution to allow an early
election to be held on November 6-7, but when the actual dissolution vote
came up, the Social Democrats did an about-face and blocked the measure,
along with the Communists and the Greens. As a result, the parliamentary
election was postponed until May 28-29, 2010, when the Chamber's four-year
term came to an end.

Both CSSD and ODS lost considerable support in the May 2010 parliamentary
election, although the Social Democrats topped the poll, narrowly ahead of
the Civic Democrats. Nonetheless, ODS and two new right-of-center parties
- Tradition Responsibility Prosperity 09 (TOP 09) and Public Affairs (VV)
- secured a sizable overall majority of 118 seats, and the three parties
subsequently reached an agreement to form a coalition government headed by
ODS leader Petr Necas.

Prime Minister Necas remained in office until June 2013, when he resigned
after his chief of staff was arrested on charges of corruption and abuse
of power. ODS then nominated Chamber of Deputies Speaker Miroslava Nemcová
to succeed Necas as head of government, but in a controversial move President
Milos Zeman appointed instead his economic advisor and former finance minister,
Jiri Rusnok to form a technocratic cabinet of non-party experts. However,
the following August Prime Minister Rusnok resigned after his government
lost a confidence vote in the Chamber of Deputies; the Chamber subsequently
voted to dissolve itself and hold an early election the following October
25-26.